The Lure of Portland

For anyone who wonders why Portland is such a lure to young creative types, D.K. Row of the Oregonian attempts to explain.

"Portland's a paradise for creative types, who can live cheaply, surrounded by garlands of lush greenery, life-enhancing amenities such as light rail and too many artisanal indulgences to name. This is also a Valhalla where culinary, environmental and sustainable ideas aren't guiding principles within a Moonie-like cult. Rather, they're embedded values. Portlanders eat, cycle and recycle seriously.

"Artists, architects, designers, gourmands, writers, musicians, soul-seeking professionals and empty nesters alike have thus migrated to our once-isolated hamlet and dramatically changed its census profile socially, politically and economically."

Quoting Meg O'Rourke, Row explains that "today's utopian downtown cultural movements" are happening in cities like Portland vs. New York because New York's identity and reality "is now too expensive to allow layers of cultural idiosyncrasy to flourish, indie sub-scenes that pointedly, even fussily, reject mainstream convention."

Row warns, however, that Portland's economy may not be an enduringly friendly place for artists.  It is, he wrote, "a miserly economy based largely on service industries, an increasing number of empty downtown storefronts, lukewarm funding for philanthropic institutions and so on."

"Is the Portland Way of Life more artful interpretation than reality?," Row asks. 

  

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